Paint Schoodic

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Start, as you always do, by squaring off the stretchers. Use a mallet to get them true and check all four corners.

Last month I was building the large canvases for my spring show
when Jane Bartlett stopped by. “Any bimbo can build a small canvas of cotton
duck,” I fretted, “but sometimes these linen beasts get out
of true, and then they’re a bear to frame.”

Once I had the fabric true on the warp and weft, I carefully folded it in quarters and set it aside.

Stretcher bars are designed to float with atmospheric
changes, hence the little wooden “keys” that come with them. While having a
solid hardwood stretcher makes life a lot easier for the canvas-builder, there
is no long-term benefit in locking down the corners by stapling or screwing
them together. When it shrinks, a big sheet of loom-state linen is going to pummel
its stretchers into compliance.

Lining up the creases with the marked midpoints of my stretchers assures me the canvas will be truly square.

Little canvases sit quietly on a table begging to be
stapled. After a certain size, you have to start manhandling them. The easiest way to prevent them from being knocked out of true is to temporarily
screw them together at a 45° angle. But that in itself is a lot of work, requiring
some woodworking skill, and you should remove the screws when you’re done stapling.

The first staples should be hand-tight, no more.

Jane (who is a textile designer) suggested I stop thinking
of it as a construction problem and start thinking about it as a textile
problem. So I applied some of my dimly-remembered 4H sewing knowledge.

And, yes, you will probably have to remove and replace staples to get the cross straight, but it's worth it.

The weft in fabric isn’t necessarily perpendicular to the
warp, particularly if it’s from the bottom of a bolt. While you can use the
reel to align your horizontal (weft) cuts, you’ve got no guarantee you’re
cutting along the grain. The only true straight-edge you have is the selvage
edge of the fabric. But using that, you can find any number of true vertical
(warp) lines with careful measuring. You can cut down the fabric to the right
size along these verticals.

Work around the canvas in a circle, adding a staple to each side until you reach the edges. The linen doesn't need to be drum-tight,.

Then enlist a friend to help you fold the fabric in half along the vertical.
Grasping each corner firmly, tug it diagonally in alternating directions.
Eventually, you will get it more or less squared off. (If you’re doing it
right, the ends will probably be cockeyed.)

Trim the edges when you finish. (If you want to make gallery-wrap canvases, I can't help you; I frame everything.)

Once I was certain I had my fabric with the warp and weft
more or less perpendicular, I folded each piece in quarters. Loomstate linen
takes a crease beautifully, so the creases became my stapling guide.

Then check the square again when you're finished.

I marked each stretcher bar’s midpoint with pencil. By
lining the creases up with these pencil marks, I was sure I was creating a
canvas that would pull tightly on the square. The first set of staples, across
the midriff of the canvas, should be hand-tight, no tighter. From there I
stapled the vertical set. Yes, I had to take staples out at this point and
adjust them, but if those four staples yield a straight cross at the right
tension, the rest of the canvas must line up true.

Finally, time to pour a little acrylic gesso on your loomstate linen. (If you want the disquisition about why I don't use PVA and oil-based gesso, just ask.)

From here I was back on familiar territory. I used canvas
pliers and worked out from the center, adding two staples to each side and then
rotating 90 degrees. The goal isn’t to tighten the fabric as far as you can;
the goal is to tighten it as evenly as you can. Watch the fabric grain as you
go; if it’s out of line, you’ve messed something up.

Use your strigil to push the gesso into the grain. At this stage, less is more; it's easier to add more gesso than to remove a gloppy excess from a canvas.

I did eight 40X48” canvases with this technique. It
was a lot faster than fixing the corners, and the canvases (now finished) look true
to me.

And do the edges and clean up any ridges with an old spalter brush and you're done. Go have a beer; you've earned it!

Let me know if
you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any
time. Click here for more
information on my Maine workshops!

Monday, December 30, 2013

Yesterday, a reader sent me this, after commenting that Käthe
Kollwitz’ Woman with Dead Child was a
frightening drawing: “It is believed Käthe
Kollwitz suffered from anxiety during her childhood due to the death of her
siblings. More recent research suggests that Kollwitz may have suffered
from a childhood neurological disorder called Alice in Wonderland
syndrome, commonly associated with migraines and sensory hallucinations…”

One presumes part of this fantastical diagnosis has to do
with the monumental scale of Kollwitz’ work, since Alice in Wonderland syndrome
includes seeing things as either really big or really small. Part of the nature
of sculpture is its monumentality, but Kollwitz was a woman. Nobody says this
kind of thing about Henry Moore, so evidently there are still art critics out
there who suffer from visual gender dimorphism.

The Carmagnole (Dance Around the Guillotine), 1901, Käthe Kollwitz.

Kollwitz was a misfit. She was born in Bismarck’s Prussia;
she was three years old when the Franco-Prussian War started. Yet her parents
and grandparents were dissident, religious, pacifist socialists who thought enough
of her potential as an artist to send her to Munich to study.

A glimpse of the happy girl whom the woman might have become: Kollwitz' self portrait from 1889.

As a woman artist, she is almost unique in having had the
unconditional support of both her father and husband to pursue her career. She married a socialist doctor, Dr. Karl
Kollwitz, who worked among Berlin’s poor. But their own political beliefs could
not inoculate them against tragedy. Their two sons, Hans and Peter, immediately
enlisted at the outbreak of hostilities in June, 1914.

“The whole thing is so ghastly and insane. Occasionally
there comes that foolish thought: how can they possibly take part in such
madness? And at once the cold shower: they must, must!” she wrote.

The Grieving Parents, 1932,
Käthe Kollwitz, now in Diksmuide, West Flanders, Belgium. This was executed as a memorial to her son Peter, who died at Diksmuide.

Later that year, Peter was killed at the Battle of the Yser
in Diksmuide, Belgium—one of a staggering 140,000 casualties over two weeks. Kollwitz
sought peace in her work and could not find it. “When [the grief] comes back I
feel it stripping me physically of all the strength I need for work. Make a
drawing: the mother letting her dead son slide into her arms. I might make a
hundred such drawings and yet I do not get any closer to him. I am seeking him.
As if I had to find him in the work... For work, one must be hard and thrust
outside one-self what one has lived through. As soon as I begin to do that, I
again feel myself a mother who will not give up her sorrow.”

As lifelong socialists, the couple worked actively to combat
the rise of fascism. Adolph Hitler responded by demanding that Kollwitz resign
from the Prussian Academy of Arts and banning Dr. Kollwitz from practicing
medicine. “For fourteen years... I have worked together peacefully with
these people. Now the Academy directors have had to ask me to resign. Otherwise
the Nazis had threatened to break up the Academy. Naturally I complied.”

Mother with Two Children, 1932-36, Käthe Kollwitz.

By then, Kollwitz was a world-famous artist and they were
invited to seek asylum elsewhere. They refused, fearing reprisals against their
family. Instead, they made a mutual suicide pact in the event of a return visit
by the Gestapo. Dr. Kollwitz died in 1940 and they lost a grandson, also named Peter,
on the Russian Front in 1942. Their house and much of her work was destroyed by
British bombers in November, 1943.

Kollwitz died on April 22, 1945, two weeks before the cessation
of European hostilities. “War accompanies me to the end,” she wrote.

Hunger, 1923, Käthe Kollwitz.

Kollwitz’ work speaks in the universal language of death,
poverty, grief, war and famine, which is why her work has had such a lasting
impact. But these were not what she set out to paint. “How can one cherish joy
when there is really nothing that gives joy? And yet the imperative is surely
right. For joy is really equivalent to strength.”

Let me know if you’re
interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time.
Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Woman with Dead Child, 1903, Kathe Kollwitz. The majority of 20th century artists presented madness and grief as a terrifying spectacle. Kollwitz, uniquely, empathized with those who were suffering.

Last week when I wrote about modern culture’s inexorable
squeeze toward a single mode of thinking, I had a vague idea that it might be
interesting to look at how madness has been painted. This proved
more difficult than I expected.

Insane Woman, 1822, Théodore Géricault, from his Monomania series.

The modern era has just too much to choose from—Edward Munch’s
The Scream, Van Gogh’s self-portrait
sans ear, the entire oeuvre of German
Expressionism. Théodore Géricault’s Monomania series has a certain appeal,
since they were an experiment in using art in the service of science. The
trouble is, the subjects look less mad than grumpy, and they’re a singularly
uninviting bunch of paintings.

Géricault’s criminally insane subjects
seem almost normal in comparison with his Romantic
portraits, but he came of age during the French Revolution. In such circumstances, there is a blurred line between sanity and insanity. Géricault himself studied
the heads of guillotine victims because he believed that character was most revealed in extremis. Nothing nuts about that, is there?

St. Bartholomew Exorcising, c. 1440-1460, the Master of the St. Bartholomew Altarpiece. Although we don’t know the identity of this painter, about 25 of his works have survived. It is presumed that he was trained in the Netherlands, although he worked in Cologne; he is considered to have been the last Gothic painter active in that city.

For all the stuff that is in there, “demonic possession” is not recognized in any versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). However, psychiatry, as a discipline, is a little more than
150 years old; exorcism has been with us since the dawn of time and spans
religious barriers. It has been practiced historically in almost every major religion
that believes that man has a soul.

Desperation, 1306. In this fresco, Giotto attributed suicide to the presence of a demon, top left.

Goya painted St. Francis de Borja performing the rite of
exorcism at least twice. By the time he was painting, exorcisms were in sharp
decline in the western world, ushered out by the Age of Reason. Oddly enough
there has been a sharp rise in exorcisms since the middle of the 20th
century. Perhaps this is a romantic notion spawned by television and movies, or
it may represent our disaffection with psychiatry.

San Francisco de Borja attends a dying unrepentant sinner, c. 1788, by Francisco Goya. Fr. Francis was an early leader of the Jesuit order, and was widely regarded during his own lifetime as a saint. Goya depicted this 16th century exorcism from a more modern viewpoint than Fr. Francis's contemporary would have; the beasts waiting to devour the unrepentant soul are not concrete.

Let me know if
you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any
time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Friday, December 27, 2013

My friend Dan Gowing was writing his Sunday school lesson this week when he realized just how efficient Jesus was with the miracle of
the loaves and the fishes. The Gospel of Mark records that there were twelve
baskets left after feeding 5,000 men and their families. Dan’s conclusion is
that you can’t actually get anything you want from Jesus’ restaurant but you
just might find you get what you need.

My holiday motto generally is, “What’s worth doing is worth
doing to excess.” In that I am a typical American. Our Thanksgiving dinner alone
usually has about twelve baskets of leftovers.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Rudolf
II as Vertumnus, 1590, takes “you
are what you eat” to its ultimate level. It’s not mere whimsy, but symbolizes
“the majesty of the ruler, the copiousness of creation and the power of the
ruling family over everything.” (Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann) He's not Dutch, but he sure is good.

In November, I posted
about Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom
from Want and how its table is almost bare by modern standards. When
Rockwell painted this a mere 70 years ago our self-identity was still Puritan.
Today we wallow in outsized appetites, and we’re all pretty fat. In fact, we’re
far more like the Dutch Golden Age than our own recent ancestors. Of course, back then
the Dutch were rich like us.

On the other hand, most of us miss the point of those Dutch
paintings entirely. If we see them just as a celebration of bounty or a cock’s
crow of vanity, we’re missing the warning sign buried in them.

Shop, with the Flight
into Egypt, top, is in fact an allegory. The Holy Family, inset in a window
frame, distributes alms to the poor as they leave. A merry group is seen eating
shellfish (a symbol of lust) through the other window. The sign at the top
tells you that the land is for sale, leading you to understand that all of this
is available at a moral price.

Still life, 1644, Adriaen van Utrecht. This canvas includes almost all the elements common to great Dutch still lives. The presence of so much exotica points to the great wealth of the Dutch Republic. However, within this epic are buried memento mori: the seashell represents human frailty; the spotted fruit, our own aging and decay; the music, the brevity of life. Like life, the peeled lemon is pretty to look at but bitter to taste.

Several cultural forces in the Dutch Republic led to their love of still life. The rise in interest in natural science in the 16th century
supported a concurrent rise in realism in painting (trompe l'oeil being the highest
expression of this). By the 17th century, the Dutch Republic
dominated world trade and had a vast colonial empire. They
operated the largest fleet of merchant ships in the world.

But while they were rich and famously religiously tolerant,
they were also strictly Calvinist. Icons were forbidden in the Dutch
Reformed Protestant Church. Painters were forced to deal with religious
subjects through symbolism. Their vanitas
paintings point out the transience of our earthly pleasures.

This was particularly easy with flowers. A language of flower symbolism had developed through the Middle Ages. These were both positive (such as the rose and lily representing love in
both its divine and human manifestation) and negative (the poppy representing
death).

The presence of symbols of impermanence, such as candles, hourglasses,
a book with pages turning, or buzzing flies, reminded the viewer that sensory
pleasures are ephemeral.

The modern equivalent, of course, is the food photograph. Its
similarity is in the excess, but it lacks self-awareness.

Let me know if
you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any
time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Pietà, (1498-99) Michelangelo.
There’s been speculation that Michelangelo was somewhere on the autism spectrum.
His hygiene was abysmal, he didn’t like talking to others, and he was monomaniacally
focused on his work. And yet he exerted an unparalleled influence on western
thinking, as a sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer.

I meet myself in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with tiresome regularity. The creative
personality (and I’m no exception) is frequently impulsive, non-conformist, and motivated by what
less-enlightened minds might call fantasy.

In the past, people actually understood that as a thinking
pattern. Today, we define impulsivity and fantastical thinking as personality
disorders. No child with this personality type will be allowed through school
without being subjected to a program of therapy and drugs to ‘normalize’ him or
her.

The Yellow Christ, 1889,
Paul Gauguin. Despite his success, Gauguin
was certainly crazy by our standards, suffering from depression and alcoholism
until he abandoned civilization for Tahiti, where he spent the last few years
of his life painting in peace.

An exasperated educator once told my husband and me that
they needed to prepare our kids for the “real world.” What does an educator know
about reality? He works in a highly-regimented environment whose goals are not
the goals of the larger world.

At the time, my husband was telecommuting with a Boston
software start-up; I paint full time. Our “normal” wasn’t even in most people’s
viewfinder. We didn’t have a typical life, but we certainly had a
self-sufficient, productive and respectable one.

St. Catherine of Alexandria, 1595-1596, Caravaggio. Psychoanalyzing Caravaggio is a popular activity
now, but there’s no doubt that even his contemporaries found him unsettling. The
model for this painting was Fillide Melandroni, who posed for several works by
Caravaggio. He tried to castrate her pimp, Tomassoni, and struck his femoral
artery instead, killing him. Among the bully boys of 16th century Rome, if a man
insulted another man’s woman, the penalty was castration. It was an age of
brawling, and any attempt to interpret it by our social code is bound to fail.

Our schools can’t cope with the creative kid who doesn’t fit
into any mold. In the past, that child might have gone on to be a Bill Gates,
Rachael Ray, or Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA), but in the modern world, most
avenues are closed to people without education.

Then there’s the question of what happens when something
goes wrong. As a society, we have a knack for pathologizing absolutely normal
human responses.

I have the personality of a terrier. I bite first
and ask questions later; however, as with my dog, my instincts are usually
spot-on. Like a watchdog, when things go wrong, I stay awake. Both times I have
been sick, my first response was insomnia. That is commonly
treated with antidepressants. I fell for that the first time, with awful
results. This time, I’m recognizing my insomnia for what it is—a normal
psychological reaction—and just enduring it.

Our ancestors used to formally identify the emotionally-bruised
and set them apart so they didn’t have to experience the full thrust of human
interaction. Nobody expected you to behave normally when you were traumatized, which
in part obviated the need for antidepressants. Today we don’t even wear black
to funerals; to wear it for a year after a loss is unthinkable. Yet, when one in ten Americans are taking antidepressants, one might
conclude that unrecognized and unprocessed grief comes back to bite us.

Cats by Louis Wain. He spent time in an asylum, but his artistic skills never diminished. That indicates that whatever was going on, he wasn't schizophrenic. Today he wouldn't be considered mentally ill; he would be a star on social media, with its outsized interest in cats.

Similarly, there is a lot to make us anxious in the modern
world. Every adolescent I’ve ever known has in some degree suffered from an
anxiety disorder, because the natural state of the adolescent is anxiety. Much
of this is emotional noise and just needs to be waited out. It’s helpful to
point that out to a kid; it’s not as helpful to tell him that he’s
fundamentally flawed and can only function with drugs.

More seriously, post-traumatic stress disorder is what
happens when a healthy human mind is traumatized. How, then, is it an illness? Is
it not in fact a normal response to an intolerable situation? If so, does it
not make sense that the human mind also has an answer to it in its own depths?
How useful is it to tell its sufferers that they’re somehow irretrievably
broken, especially since there’s no good comprehensive treatment for PTSD?

In the past—ironically enough—the deeply traumatized individual
might have been guided to write or paint or otherwise express his or her fears
through creative expression. Too bad that we now want to just wipe that out with drugs.

Let me know if you’re
interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time.
Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Nativity crèche at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Rochester, NY. This follows the German custom of not placing the Christ Child in place until Christmas. I confess to secretly plotting for years with my friend Judie to steal this and resurrect it on our Town Triangle on a Friday night, in the belief that nobody could call to complain until after sundown on Saturday. But my respect for the crèche's creator, Al Bullwinkle, always stays my hand.

Every November the United States schedules a ruckus over
removing religious symbols from our public spaces. Despite that, the Nativity crèche
remains our favorite folk art form, at least now that those plywood
cutouts of gardener’s butts are passé.

St. Francis
instituting the crèche at Greccio, painted by Giotto sometime around 1300.

St. Francis of Assisi is generally credited with creating
the first Nativity scene. It was 1223, and he was attempting to center
Christmas on the worship of Christ rather than on materialism and gift giving. It was a Living Nativity, and he staged it in a cave. Not
only did he not make much headway against crass commercialism, the next year
the Church recorded the first fight over who got to play the Blessed Virgin
Mary.

The Metropolitan
Museum has a magnificent 18th century Neapolitan
crèche set, which changes every year as they add new pieces.

The first sculpted Italian terra cotta Nativity sets were
created shortly after that, probably because they couldn't talk back. As crèches were scaled down to fit in homes, their
construction shifted to include wood, wax, and plaster. Like other icons, many were forms of tow and wire with beautifully-sculpted faces and hands, dressed in lovely silk clothing. The custom reached its zenith in 18th
century Naples. The Metropolitan Museum has an outstanding collection of these crèche
figures.

Today there are plastic Fontanini sets from Italy, plaster crèches
from Bavaria, Kraków szopka from Poland, carved-wood sets from South America, paper nativities—in short the crèche
tradition has as many variations as the world has cultures. Nobody loves them more than Americans,
where we translate the Holy Family into Peanuts™ characters and turn nativity sets into collectibles that we then bid up into dazzling prices in our other art form, the marketplace.

Polish nativity set, or Kraków szopka. I have a beautiful polychrome nativity set, one made of pressed clay by my kids, and a mismatched plaster set made by my sister and brother and me in Sunday school almost fifty years ago. All are equally precious to me.

I live in a place whose town triangle in December is graced
not by a crèche, but by a sewer-pipe menorah. Nativity crèches have
great currency even here. I get great joy from peeking at them
through lighted windows this time of year.

The blessings of the season be with you!

Let me know if
you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any
time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Monday, December 23, 2013

By the time you read this, I will be snoring softly under a
general anesthetic while the very gifted Dr. Eugene P. Toy takes a sharp knife
to my innards.

This is my sixth surgery in fourteen years. If a stranger
told me that, I’d think either he was suffering from Münchausen syndrome or had
had so much plastic surgery that he ought to look as good as Michael
Jackson. But neither is true here. Nor am I particularly worried. This is a horrible clanger in my schedule, but I’m
confident that I’m in God’s hands.

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go. That includes not just nail polish, but greyscale markers, drawing paper, and a sketchbook. And my list of paintings.

I did the above cartoon after a memorable day with our
family doctor, Dr. Bernard Plansky, in 2000. (He’s the guy responsible for catching my first cancer after an internist and gastroenterologist missed it; if you object to my
presence here, take it up with him.) Rather than drive back to Roswell Park to have
my staples removed, I asked him to do it.

He had a resident with him whose job was basically to hold my hand to stop me from whining. Dr. Plansky asked
if the resident could pull a few staples for the experience. I’m all for apprenticeship,
so of course I said yes. But my deal was that I got to remove one myself. The
great blessing of my life is that even the darkest times end up being a little absurd, and thus filled with laughter.

I made canvases for my spring show before my hospitalization. That's nine large linen canvases in the back, and bunch of sketch boards in the front. They'll be totally dry by the time I get home. I plan just to draw in hospital, but if they don't spring me fast enough, I'll bring in contraband art supplies.

I never painted this self-portrait, but I still like the idea. However,
it has to wait until I’m done with my current project. To that end, I’ve made nine beautiful big linen canvases. I’ve toned them and my sketch boards. They’ll be thoroughly
dry when I get home. I’ve packed my sketchbook and my greyscale markers. I’m as
ready as I’ll ever be.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or
Rochester at any time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

The Adoration of the Magi (tapestry), 1904, by Edward Burne-Jones. Note the angel leading the magi with the Star of Bethlehem cupped in his hands.

My father occasionally talked about the last time he saw his
father. He said he was a very small boy, and there had been a blizzard on St. Patrick's Day,
and he and his mother saw his father briefly on the street.

After he was long dead, I realized he was talking about the
Great St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard of 1936, when he was, in fact, 12 years old. That
time compression, in an odd way, lends verisimilitude to his tale. We can all
understand a fatherless boy conflating the two most memorable events of his
young childhood. There is nothing rehearsed or too perfect about that: it sings
from the heart.

Adoration of the Magi, 1504, Albrecht Dürer. The Bible doesn't specify that there were Three Wise Men; it doesn't say one was black; it doesn't name them Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior.

The visit of the Magi to the infant Christ child has a star
hanging over it: the Star of Bethlehem. The identity of this star has
interested scientists for as long as we have studied the heavens. It may have
been the conjunction of planets or stars, it may have been Halley’s Comet,
which showed up in 12 BC. It may have been another comet detected in the Far East around
5 BC.

The trouble is that none of these events line up perfectly
enough to satisfy an image of the Magi worshipping the newborn Christ in the
manger. (Of course, the story doesn't say he was a newborn, either.) The slight misalignment between the Gospel story and what science currently says gives it the ring of truth.

Detail from Mary and Child, surrounded by angels, 526 AD, Master of Sant'Apollinare, Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy.

We translate “magi” as “wise men” but they were probably actually astrologers:
men who studied the influence of the heavenly spheres on the lives
of mere mortals. That’s a discipline we completely discount today, but who
better to follow a star to the Living God?

Let me know if you’re interested in
painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Friday, December 20, 2013

The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Chinese. 20th century, Unknown Artist (and that’s a pity, because
it’s a wonderful painting).

And there were
shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at
night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord
shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them,
“Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all
the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you;
he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You
will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great
company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the
highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor
rests.”

The Annunciation to the Shepherds, 1663, Abraham Hondius. This is exactly what I see in my mind’s eye,
including the fat little putti.

When the angels had
left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to
Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us
about.”

So they hurried off and
found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had
seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this
child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to
them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her
heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all
the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

Annunciation to the Shepherds, first half of 17th century, Juan Dò. Until recently, this
painting was unattributed, which is oddly appropriate, considering it’s a portrait of the
lowest of the low.

Because of the time compression of the Bible, we get the
impression that angels regularly zipped down to earth. I’m no theologian, but
that doesn’t seem to be strictly true. There are a lot of visitations of angels
in the early times recorded in Genesis—to Adam and Eve, to Hagar, to Sarah and Abraham, to
Lot, to Jacob. Perhaps the most charming story of angels appears in Numbers, when
Balaam is being such a jerk that the angel works through his donkey instead.

The visitations by angels in the
Old Testament happened over thousands of years. On the other hand, during
the brief period in which Jesus and his disciples lived, angels seemed awfully active.
Angels were with Jesus at his birth, at his temptation in the desert, in the
Garden of Gethsemane, when the tomb was empty, and at his ascension to heaven.
Likewise, an angel appeared to Peter when in prison.

The Annunciation to the Shepherds, 1875, Jules Bastien-Lepage, who is most famous for his brilliant Jeanne
d’Arc at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mary, of course, received a visit from the angel Gabriel, and
Joseph was spoken to by an angel. But those darn shepherds; now, that’s a weird
story. If Joseph and Mary were nobodies in the Roman Empire, those shepherds
were lower than dirt. And yet Caesar Augustus sat alone in his palace and a
whole choir of angels came down to talk to the shepherds in Bethlehem instead.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in
Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!

Thursday, December 19, 2013

The Nativity, 1912, Sir
Stanley Spencer. Joseph is off to the right, doing something to the chestnut tree.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Raphael, Rubens,
Tiepolo, Correggio, and the other great painters who’ve painted exquisite
Nativities. But there is something arresting about the mystical nativity, where reality is
somehow subsumed in spiritual fervor.

Sir Stanley Spencer painted the Nativity, top, as a student
at Slade in 1912. He later explained:

The couple occupy the
centre of the picture, Joseph who is to the extreme right doing something to
the chestnut tree and Mary who stands by the manger… Joseph is only related to Mary in this picture
by some sacramental ordinance... This relationship has always interested me and
in those early works I contemplated a lot of those unbearable relationships
between men and women.

The embracing couple represents physical love
in contrast to Mary and Joseph’s spiritual connection. That goes with
Spencer’s amazingly messed-up attitudes toward women and sex. Spencer's strict separation between the spiritual and the
physical is the neo-Platonic trap into which many of the mystic painters fall. The whole point of the Incarnation is that God becomes man, sharing our joys, sorrows, and, yes, the messy realities of our births and deaths.

Nativity, 1310, Giotto. Joseph seems to be sleeping.

Giotto is generally considered the first Renaissance
painter, but he was firmly in touch with his medieval self. That gave him a leg up for mysticism. The pre-Renaissance
world was able to see in a non-literal way that is almost completely lost to
us. This allows the
infant John the Baptist to sit at the bottom of the frame while Jesus is being
born, and the almost-disembodied angels that arch across the top of the
painting like a Byzantine architrave.

The Nativity, 1492, Domenico Ghirlandaio. You have to zoom in to see her laser-beam prayer. What is it with poor Joseph? Asleep again.

Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the Virgin Mary sending laser
beams of prayer down to the infant Jesus while a heavenly choir sings above.
The columns and one-point perspective point us that much farther along the
Renaissance. All that gold
leaf you’re seeing in the Italian paintings of this time is supposed to remind
you of the untarnished nature of the story.

The Mystical Nativity, 1500-01, Sandro Botticelli. Believe it or not, Joseph is sleeping.

Sandro Botticelli described the Nativity as the moment when heaven
and earth touch. He was painting at the apogee of the Italian
Renaissance, which accounts for the more concrete nature of his visionary
angels—he couldn’t throttle back on the realism like Giotto or Ghirlandaio . In
his later years, Botticelli fell under the influence of a fanatical Florentine preacher,
Savonarola. There is something almost manic in the earthly action in this
painting that points to the spiritual oppression of the time.

The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, 1434-36, Jan van Eyck. Joseph doesn't even show up for this one.

By the fifteenth century, the idea of the Virgin Mary as
intercessor for the sinful had gained traction. Jan van Eyck’s The Madonna with Canon van der Paele shows
the donor beseeching the Virgin Mary and Sts. Donatian and George. The intense
realism and the fine architectural drawing contrast with the unreality of these four figures sharing a common space.

The Nativity, c. 1810, William Blake. At least Joseph is actually present.

William Blake painted the above panel, on copper, concurrently
with his Europe, a Prophecy, from
which comes his wonderful Ancient
of Days painting. At about the same time, he also painted a series of
watercolors illustrating Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity”:

It was the winter wild,
While the Heav'n-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies...

But Blake, as usual, strayed off into his neo-Platonic world-view. Here the soul of Jesus leaps fully formed toward the
soul of John the Baptist. No encumbrances such as the messy reality of childbirth
or our imprisonment in our fleshly bodies gets in the way.

Let me know if you’re
interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time.
Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!